Three of them make the mistake of waiting outside. Three city guys in baggy suits and street shoes waiting in the brush around the double-wide, their black Suburban only half-hidden behind the tin shed where Milo’s Caddy is parked, the smoke of their cigarettes hanging in the still air of the desert dawn. A dark blue roil of clouds threatens just beyond the mountains to the north. I could wait for the wind and rain. It would be easier in the rain with the wind to cover the sound of my movements. But I can’t wait.
I strip off my bloody and torn uniform, dress in my breechcloth and knee-high moccasins, and take them one at a time with the Bowie. It’s all I can do to keep from taking their scalps. A knife makes you think that way.
Luck is with me. Through a crack in the living room curtains I can see Whitney and Lester bound and gagged on the carpet, a sleepy thug on the couch, another goddamned mini-Uzi resting on his knees. I watch for a moment. Whitney and Lester look exhausted and terrified but awake and alive. Thankfully alive.
There’s a silenced .22 in my gear, but I can’t kill him in front of my family. Can’t. So I crawl beneath the steps, crouch, waiting, occasionally tapping on the aluminum door with my blade, tap until the bastard steps outside to see what’s happening.
When I cut his throat, I nearly take his head off.
I can’t go inside covered with blood, can’t scrub the blood off me with sand, can’t leave the bastard’s body sprawled at my front door. So I stash it in their Suburban. And the others, too.
Then I head for the horse trough to wash away the dark smears that cover my body. I don’t know how long I stand naked in the water. Long enough for the blue norther to triumph over the dawn, arriving on blistering gusts of wind and needles of sleet. Long enough to remember the long float down the irrigation ditch, muddy water thick in my mouth, my blood leaking like sand. Long enough to know I’ll never be afraid again.
Only then do I retrieve my gear from the brush, dress, and climb the steps as if climbing a gallows into my house.
Now, goddammit, now nothing will ever be the same.
Lester is the easiest to calm. The long silent Apache hours we’ve spent in chaparral have paid off. He’s tough, no longer a baby. He drinks the hot milk and coffee, then goes to pack without asking a question. Just a few things, I tell the boy. You have to choose what you can’t leave behind.
Whitney, on the other hand, tough as she is, has a lot of questions. Too many. But after a few minutes of long, hard holding, she, too, throws a few things together she can’t bear to leave behind—a picture of her parents in a canoe in the Boundary Waters; a perfect obsidian arrowhead she once found outside Terlingua; our marriage license—then waits for me at the door.
“You’re not taking anything?” she says.
“You and our son,” I answer. “That’s all I need.”
Whitney hugs me until my ribs crack.
“Fucking Milo,” she whispers fondly. The boy hears and grins.
Before we can leave, we hear the sound of a car, its springs creaking over the rough road. Not coming fast. But coming.
“Shit,” I say, picking up the Uzi. “If anything happens, go out the back door and run. Lester knows the way.”
The car, an anonymous gray sedan, stops in front as I step outside. It’s the rawboned guy from the DEA compound. He climbs out of the car, not even glancing at the Uzi, ignoring it as he does the freezing rain in his face.
“Where’s your buddy Milodragovitch?” he says.
“I don’t know,” I admit. “Exactly. Maybe dead in Mexico. Why?”
“He called me late yesterday afternoon,” the agent says. “Told me he was bringing Emilio Kaufmann across the border.”
“What for?”
“For me.”
“What for?”
“To keep your sorry ass off death row,” he says. “But he didn’t show.”
“Shit,” I say, too tired to think. “Look, I’ll make you a deal. If you’ll take my family to a safe place,” I say, “I’ll go get the son of a bitch for you.”
“Which one? Milodragovitch or Kaufmann?”
“Whatever,” I say.
“Deal,” he says.
“Deal,” I say, then sigh. “Isn’t that what law enforcement is all about?”
“Sometimes,” he answers tiredly.